A useful post at Burning Our Money about baby P, reminding us that the previous Ofsted inspection was led by one Juliet Winstanley, who'd worked under the now suspended social service head Ms Shoesmith in a previous job. It delivered a favourable report on the basis of a self-assessment. We know how reliable La Shoesmith's self-assessments were. Of course this isn't the only smoking...

I've rarely felt so proud of my countrymen. The ferocity and the universality of the reaction to l'affaire Green has had me snorting with joy over my newspapers - much to the bewilderment of my fellow Eurostar travellers. I had feared that the nation would give an indifferent shrug, concluding that all MPs are probably guilty of something or other, and that no one should be above the law...

With a load of economic data out this morning the pound is off 1% against the euro, the Purchasing Managers Index is down sharply, mortgage lending is down 70% year on year, credit card borrowing is up, PWC have research out saying Briton's are now personally £1.5 trillion in debt - yet Gordon wants them to spend, spend, spend more. It is not all bad news though, Guido is short the FTSE....

Large energy projects for oil, gas and renewables are facing a "double whammy" of falling oil prices and tightening financing conditions, raising concerns about future supplies once demand start to pick up again, experts have warned.

Delegates from 186 nations are in Poznan, Poland today (1 December) to launch 12 days of talks designed to bring forward an international deal to tackle climate change. But the conference is currently overshadowed by an EU internal row over how to share the 'effort' of reducing CO2 emissions.

Long before the arrest of Damian Green, senior Conservatives were given legal advice about the difference between receiving leaked documents and inducing civil servants to leak them. This suggests that they were well aware of the danger - political as well as legal - of either placing (or "grooming", in the phrase used by the police) political spies within the Whitehall machine. This goes some way...

A thousand years ago, or rather last Friday, the KCNA reported this: "Should the enemies infringe upon the inviolable sky, land and sea of the country even 0.001mm, the DPRK will mercilessly wipe out provocateurs with the might of Songun and thus remove the root cause of a war from this land". And today it has this to say: "The U.S. imperialist aggression forces committed at least 110 cases of aer...

If the plight of the humble British pub was in a bad shape at the time of writing this post, I think its safe to say that Alistair Darling’s decision to stick an extra 8% on alcohol excise duty will contribute to even more old-fashioned boozers being bankrupted. Sniffing an opportunity to make nice with their

John Redwood is good at sums. And he tells us that Prime Minister Brown's spin about how much he is currently borrowing, is a little bit short of the mark. Brown claims GBP 78 billion to be the amount he will be needing to borrow next year. Redwood, however, points out that in fact Brown is already borrowing GBP 157 billion in the current year. When you take into account that in a recession g...

Two MPs who between them have significantly contributed to undermining democracy and the role of parliament are now amongst those most voluble in defending parliamentary privilege – and both are given space in The Daily Telegraph. The first pile of cant we have already looked at - that was Nick Clegg who gravely opines that "the sight of police rifling through boxes of Mr Green's corres...